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Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of Windows Azure HDInsight, its cloud-based distribution of Hadoop.

The service has been in public production preview for a number of months now and now Microsoft brings it to full GA status in Azure.

Windows Azure HDInsight combines the Hadoop open source technology with security and manageability features for the enterprise. It integrates with Excel and Power BI - Micrsoft's business intelligence offering that is part of Office 365 - allowing people to connect to data through HDInsight, then refine and do business analytics in a turnkey fashion. For the developer, HDInsight also supports choice of languages: .NET, Java and more.

"Our vision is how do we bring big data to a billion people," said Eron Kelly, Microsoft's SQL Server General Manager. "We want to make the data and insights accessible to everyone."

Microsoft and Hortonworks originally announced plans to bring the Hadoop big-data framework to Windows Server and Windows Azure in the fall of 2011. Hortonworks announced in February this year that its HDP platform was an extension of its two-year-old Hadoop partnership with Microsoft.

HDP allows users to deploy Hadoop on Windows Server in their own datacenters -- the same way they can already deploy HDP on several Linux distributions.

Hortonworks announced general availability of HDP 2.0 last week. Microsoft plans to update the HDInsight code base to take advantage of HDP 2.0 within a month.